


Meltdown

by Louffox



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Filth, Icky, Potatoes, descriptions of filth and nastiness but canon level ick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 17:07:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21285185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Louffox/pseuds/Louffox
Summary: Statement of Marie Fuchs, regarding an agricultural disease testing locker meltdown. Statement taken six June, two thousand and six. Statement recorded by Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant. Statement begins.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16
Collections: Piles of Nonsense 2019





	Meltdown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shipwreckblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipwreckblue/gifts).

_Statement of Marie Fuchs, regarding an agricultural disease testing locker meltdown. Statement taken six June, two thousand and six. Statement recorded by Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant. Statement begins._

This sort of thing has never scared me before. I mean- I didn’t think I would be scared by this. But I guess reading about disease, the foul murk, festering and filth, decay and sickness… it’s different than experiencing it. I thought I wanted to experience it. I really did. I even got a career centered around both disease and decay because I thought I wanted this.

I never thought…

I went to school for biological engineering. Biological- life, bodies, systems, and engineering- creating, designing, repairing. My degree was focused on how to fix things, but I was always more fascinated by how things could go wrong. There was only one right way to do things, but there are a hundred thousand wrong ways to do things. And those wrong things, the ways it can break down, the things that attack and pull life apart, that’s infinitely more interesting and creative, in my opinion.

My university didn’t have much in the way of job placement, and I didn’t want to go to grad school. Four years of engineering college had burned me out. I found a job at a disease testing laboratory, which had all the disease testing protocols- ELISA assays, PCR, immunoblots, DNA and RNA extraction- but had the bonus of it not being human diseases. Pathogens that infect plants aren’t designed to attack mammalian cells. If I got a cold, I liked joking that I had ‘caught the PVY’. Such a thing was impossible. I was free to drink coffee or snack around the lab, unlike a hospital lab or other human disease laboratory. I missed the risk, the thrill, but I was satisfied. It was a good stepping stone for a girl fresh out of university.

Now, at the time, the lab was undergoing a lot of changes. The position had changed a lot. Previously, the crop of potatoes was tested for virus by planting- they would ship the potatoes to a place where they could plant during the winter, let them grow, and visually observe leaves for signs of disease. This was being replaced by lab testing for the virus. It was faster, cheaper, and less objective than a visual observation. But the virus can’t be found in potato flesh- the starches inhibit the testing procedure, the virus can’t be detected reliably. The test does work excellently on potato sprouts.

This was all very new to our lab. My lab now, as the previous manager didn’t want to do the massive new testing regime and took an early retirement. I was eager to prove myself. I contacted a lab in a different country that had a lot of experience with this test, and got advice on how to best proceed.

I still don’t know when the miscommunication happened. I don’t know how we got our wires crossed, or if they told me wrong, or if I heard wrong, or wrote down the wrong numbers.

The best way to get a potato to sprout quickly is with high humidity, as high as I could get it, and as warm as I could get it without cooking them. 98 degrees farenheight was the temperature I had written down.

I brought in the samples, blue crates of potatoes all labeled and stacked to the ceiling, and put them in a big storage locker at the back of the lab. The storage locker was built like a fridge, but instead of keeping things cold, it would keep them warm. I brought in several humidifiers, cranked them up, and closed the door. Two weeks was my goal. I checked them daily.

The sprouts began. Growing like worms, rising tall and pale and filthy from the dirt brown skin of the tubers. They were disgusting. I was so proud of my sprouts. We began the testing, and they grew so fast, it was a rush to keep up with the sprouts. They were growing so fast. I was overjoyed.

They didn’t grow like elegant spikes, tapered and slender. They grew fat, chunky, knobbly, splitting off, growing thick knuckles and crooks. Fingerlike and pale in the hot, humid room. It smelled of dirt.

When the smell changed, I should’ve taken the hint.

Dirt and soil, agriculture. The slight dry, starchy scent of potatoes. And underneath it… ammonia. Something acidic and pungent. It was hard to pinpoint. The smell kept changing, from acrid ammonia, to briny salty smell like things dying on a low-tide beach, to the circus smell of elephants, methane and dog shit, ammonia again. It stuck in my nose when I exited the locker, after spending long peering through the holes in the sides of the stacked crates, towers of them over my head, packed in so I could fit them all, the aisles between them just barely wide enough for me- my shoulders brushed the crates, and I was glad for my labcoat, a barrier between me and the reaching worm-like fingers of sprouts.

The smell got worse.

I found a few rotten potatoes from the tops of crates and removed them.

Then the flies appeared.

I began keeping the office door closed- when I had a salad with a vinegary dressing for lunch, I had to eat in my car. They were tiny fruitflies, the type that darted at your eyes and tickled at your ears. Annoying. And quickly getting worse, to the point that they buzzed around your nose when you breathed. My lab techs began wearing goggles after one got one in his tear duct.

When he complained about a fly in his eye, we teased him a bit. And then he couldn’t get it out. He went to the bathroom mirror to try and rinse it out with water. I offered to help, and tilted his head back and held his watering, red eye open to try and find it.

It was right there, at the corner of his eye. I couldn’t see the actual fly. But I could see the wriggling, thrashing body of it, a bulge beneath a tiny layer of skin at the corner of his eye. My stomach flipped, and I laughed it off, horrified and trying to convert it to amusement and awe. Half an hour at the eyewash station finally got rid of it, and we all were a little disturbed after, making jokes to try and make light of it.

Soon we had to wear face masks too, to keep the fruit flies out of our noses and airways. There was definitely something going on in that storage locker.

The flies were definitely thicker in the back corner of the locker. But the stack in the corner was impossible to access without pulling nearly all the others out. It was too tight. I forbade anyone else from going into the storage locker, trying to avoid another tear duct incident. I knew something bad was brewing, and I could only thing, _I must not let them be exposed_. To what, I was unsure, but I opened and closed the door as quickly as possible, never leaving it open for more than a few moments to slip through.

I complained to the higher ups that there was a bad smell, and some rot. And I was told that if I had a frail stomach, they could find another job for me. I didn’t bring it up again.

When a potato rots, it can either go rubbery and sort of powdery, which is a dry rot. Or it can go soft and wet. Common adjectives used to classify types of rot in potatoes were ‘cottage cheese’, ‘leak’, and ‘snot’. Sometimes the flesh stayed light colored and just went soft and could be scooped out like apple sauce. Sometimes it took on a viscous stretch as it went to liquid, and would string along like melted cheese or mucous.

Sometimes it can turn black.

The day came when I entered the storage locker to pull a sample for the techs to test, squinting behind goggles, breathing carefully through my paper mask, and I found the floor was now black and wet. A murky, briny liquid had appeared sometime in the night, and had coated the floor with a shocking suddenness. Writhing in it was thousands of fruit fly maggots, each only the size of a comma, but they piled on each other and formed small balls and islands that wriggled and thrashed around in the water. They were crawling into the otherwise healthy sample crates and burrowing in, spreading the rot. I felt the first lurching sensation that this was out of control. My samples were melting down around me. How was I going to get the testing done? I needed to test sprouts, I couldn’t test a sludge pile.

This shouldn’t have been the first of my concerns.

I could handle it.

I wanted to handle it.

I would prove I could handle it.

It was wintertime, and developing a deep hacking cough wasn’t unheard of.

I started staying later. I couldn’t sleep well anyways, kept up by haunting remnants of the soft rustling sound that a million maggots could make, and that cough. I knew the meltdown was accelerating, and I needed to get it done.

I had to wear boot covers into the storage locker. The black brine was deep.

Finally, we had tested enough and moved things around so I could access the worst of the rot in the corner. I had goggles, a mask, a lab coat buttoned from neck to knees, gloves pulled over my sleeves, boot covers. I grabbed the top crate. They were stacked high, and it was above my head, and I was on my toes, trying to lift the weight and not tip over with it. The sides I grabbed were oddly hot to the touch.

A slurping, rending sound nearly startled me into dropping the crate, and the weight suddenly shifted. I stumbled backward into another stack, almost knocking it over, still barely holding the crate.

The bottom of the crate splashed my face with black ooze as it splattered into the crate below it.

Somehow, the thick blue plastic of the crate had fallen apart and dropped out, into the bin of what was once potatoes beneath it.

I retched, taking short breaths to try and not vomit into my mask. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that only served to intensify the sound of worms and wet that stayed in my ears all day, and the drip of potatoes melting to black sludge, and the rustle of dry sprout fingers still reaching up from the foul.

I fled the locker.

No, wait. I froze, hand on the doorknob. I wasn’t exactly covered in the brine (_oh god oh god oh gross_) but it speckled my glasses, my mask, pooled in the creases of my bootcovers. My gloves were soaked in it, and my sleeves. I could feel flecks of it itching as it dried on my nose and cheeks and forehead. God, it was probably _in my hair_.

My instinct to flee and _get it off get it off get it off_ was strong, but there was a stronger other instinct- _don’t let it spread_.

_It’s just potato rot_, I told myself. _Just ammonia and liquefied starch and maybe fruitfly maggots, okay, but those aren’t anything bad._

At the time, I didn’t wonder at how a thick hard plastic crate had fallen apart, if this was just rotten vegetable juice.

The brackish black liquid sloshed around my feet, hot and pressing the boot covers tight to my shoes, seeking entrance, as I rocked on my toes, deciding.

The smell was fecal, the worst brine of the ocean, cat piss, methane, putrescine, cadaverine. I could _smell_ the heat and humidity.

I opened the door and stepped out.

Turns out, it wasn’t just a load of rotten potatoes. I’d rotted them. I’d done it. I’d royally screwed up. The temperature wasn’t supposed to be 98F, it was supposed to be closer to 60F. I couldn’t understand where or when or how I’d made the mistake.

And the rot wasn’t just rot.

I went to the higher ups and turned in receipts for cat litter, shovels, and a new order of XL biosafety garbage bags, and a few of them followed me downstairs, curious. The plant pathologist who did research with the university programs staggered back, gagging hard, when I opened the door. The woman from HR went pale. We added heavy duty mold safety respirators and sent the lab techs home. The locker’s temperature was turned down and humidifiers simply thrown in the garbage, not even bothering to try and salvage them or examine what had happened to the filters. Most of the office upstairs helped, which was a godsend, because I was… doing poorly.

I was handling the revulsion better than most- either because I was determined for them not to say _if you can’t stomach the job, you can’t have the job_ again, and wanted to prove I was capable of managing the lab, or perhaps because I was desensitized to it at that point. At some point, I’d adopted a sort of… glee. This was what I’d read about in all my bio-terror books, every gorey plague film. The flies were straight out of the Exorcism. I couldn’t have asked for a better horror scene. And seeing the research folks, the people who worked at their desk and put in requests for people to do my job, and received raw data from a sterile while excel file on a computer that perhaps smelled like warm, clean plastic- seeing them retch and choke, watching them struggle to maintain composure as they faced what I had been dealing with silently, every day… It’s uncharitable of me, probably, but I thought it was absolutely hilarious. And to think, I’d been told if I couldn’t stomach it, I could find another job. Perhaps all of them ought to be fired. I had pushed through. I endured it, I waded through the muck and putrefaction. The black brine sludge, the slouching piles of rotting potatoes seeping from the bottoms of the crates, every surface I touched being hot, slick, and shivering with maggots piled on top of one another- it was just another day at work. It had become the normal.

I could still smell it at home, and in my car, and in my sleep.

The coughing was still there, but now it wasn’t productive. I worried I’d gotten pneumonia- I had mild asthma and allergies, but since I’d started a rigorous workout regime in college and maintained it, I had no trouble breathing. But now I was having to stop halfway up the stairs to catch my breath, trying not to breathe too hard because I would start coughing, and coughing, and coughing, unable to stop, unable to catch my breath, never actually coughing anything up.

The locker was aired out over a weekend. We left all the doors open, security be damned, with fans to blow it out. We set up plans for next year- to have some form of ventilation system built into the locker, rather than having to vent it through the rest of the lab. I took the following Monday off as well, hoping a day of sleeping would help me catch my breath.

It didn’t.

One of the lab techs bullied me into her car and drove me to the hospital, when I admitted I couldn’t even eat because I couldn’t get enough air. I was foggy, at that point. The cleanup, the black fluids, the rot, my mistakes, and then finally the lack of oxygen and struggle to just _breathe_, it turned every moment into tunnel vision. I couldn’t focus on anything past the lack of air. She helped me inside and demanded I be seen. I told the doctors I probably had pneumonia.

I didn’t have pneumonia.

I had rot.

As I’d spent weeks trying to monitor the rot in the locker, constantly walking around, breathing deeply to try and follow the smell, I had been pulling the rot inside myself. I had chased it, sought it, and in turn it had found me.

The doctor gave me inhalers to reduce the swelling and infection in my lungs. Because I had mold in my lungs.

I had _mold_ in my _lungs_.

All the while the locker had been melting down, I had been unaware that the rot was already inside, inside me, those reaching finger sprouts had reached in and left me with something. A smell that I couldn’t get out of my nose. Lungs too full to function. The squelch and drip as it all fell apart and dissolved into dark foul filthy decay, hot and rotten, reeking writhing splashing spreading-

Technically, I had an allergy-like reaction to the mold. Technically I didn’t have mold in my lungs.

They gave me medication and inhalers and lots of check ups.

I can breathe again.

And the air I breathe still smells like dark liquid, heat, flies,

fetid and humid

cloying, thick, maggots and growth

rotting

Maybe I’d rather not be able to draw breath at all.

_St… statement ends. Eugh. That’s… all I can think of is…_

_Follow up. Right. Okay… so, Maria Fuchs did indeed work at an agricultural disease testing lab in 2006, fresh out of college. And here’s her missing person’s report, and her obituary. Damn. Looks like she just went into the woods and never came out. She apparently was an avid hiker and outdoorswoman, so nobody really thought anything of it… Nope, I can’t read this. I’m… I’m done, I think._

_I’m going to get some tea. And some for Jon. He probably would appreciate a cup of tea right now._

_… and I’d really appreciate the company, to be honest. Don’t like being alone, thinking of that. Worms. Staring at the closed office door. No. I’ll… yeah, Jon would probably like some tea._


End file.
